This week the CrimProf Blog spotlights Pace Law School CrimProf Michelle Simon.

Michelle Simon joined the faculty in 1985. Prior to coming to Pace, she was a law clerk to Magistrate A. Simon Chrein in the Eastern District of New York, and an associate at the firm of Wilson, Elser, Moskowitz, Edelman and Dicker. While with that firm, she specialized in products liability litigation.

She is an honors graduate of Syracuse University College of Law, where she served as Senior Lead Articles Editor of the Syracuse Law Review. Since 2001, she has been the Associate Dean of Academic Affairs at the law school, and teaches in the areas of criminal law, legal writing, and civil procedure. She has written extensively in all of those areas. [Mark Godsey]

Why did Justice Rehnquist behave the way he did in Dickerson v. United States? As written, many prevailing accounts accept Justice Rehnquist's opinion in Dickerson v. United States at face value and disavow the potential of a strategic explanation. The difficulty with the non-strategic accounts is their failure to outline explicitly the evidence supporting the uniqueness of their theory. Specifically, these explanations largely ignore the alternative set of preferences which could have produced the Chief's decision. This is troubling because prior scholarship demonstrates that a chief justice possesses a unique set of institutional powers which provides significant incentive for him to behave sophisticatedly.

Many prevailing explanations for Dickerson at a minimum are incomplete because they fail to determine whether his vote and opinion were the result of moderation, fidelity to traditional legal principles, or, in fact, strategic behavior. This article pursues a uniqueness claim, arguing the gravamen of available evidence supports a strategic explanation for Justice Rehnquist's behavior in Dickerson. To do this, the article first reviews the methodological debate which exists within the social science scholarship, a debate relevant to the competing explanations for the Dickerson decision.

Next, the article explores the strategic or quasi-game theoretic approach by describing the multistage sophisticated process which produces all Supreme Court decisions. It culminates in Figure 1.1, a general diagram that is carried forward into Part II of the article. Part II directly considers the Dickerson decision. This section begins with a description of the Supreme Court's Miranda jurisprudence before reviewing the specific facts and procedural history of the case.

Next, Part II reviews Justice Rehnquist's Miranda-related decisions which, taken together, demonstrate the truly anomalous nature of the Dickerson opinion. The article then outlines its strategic account, an approach rejecting many prevailing explanations of Rehnquist's behavior. Strategic and non-strategic behaviors are often observationally equivalent.

Thus, in order firmly to support its strategic theory, this article concludes with a discussion of several important post-Dickerson decisions including Chavez v. Martinez, Missouri v. Seibert, and United States v. Patane, where the Chief Justice surprisingly supports the preservation of certain exceptions to Miranda even after his Dickerson opinion supposedly afforded Miranda full constitutional status. The cases are critical to the analysis because they help determine what end Chief Justice Rehnquist actually achieved in his Dickerson opinion. He successfully froze a set of pre-Dickerson Miranda exceptions which he personally developed during his thirty year tenure on the Court. It is from this perspective that commentators in fact are correct to argue that Dickerson is critical to understanding the legacy of the late Chief Justice. [Mark Godsey]

Kathleen Brickey, a criminal law specialist, is the author of three books and more than two dozen articles and chapters published in scholarly journals and books. Her three-volume treatise, "Corporate Criminal Liability," and her casebook, "Corporate and White Collar Crime," are leading works in the field.

She is a member of the American Law Institute and the Society for the Reform of Criminal Law, and has served as Chair of the Association of American Law Schools Criminal Justice Section and as a consultant to the United States Sentencing Commission.

In 1991, she received the Washington University Alumni Distinguished Teaching Award and the John C. Vance Award for the best paper in the field of transportation law, awarded by a research arm of the National Academy of Sciences. She was named an Israel Treiman Faculty Fellow for the 2000-2001 and 2002-2003 academic years. [Mark Godsey]

Carrie Hempel is a directing attorney for the USC Post-Conviction Justice Project, a clinical program that provides legal assistance to people who have been convicted of crimes and have exhausted their right to a court-appointed attorney. Professor Hempel’s recent work focuses on women convicted of killing abusive partners before evidence of battered women’s syndrome was accepted by the courts as a murder defense. She is an expert in post-conviction matters, gender and law, and criminal law.

Prior to joining USC Law in 1993, she practiced with Los Angeles and Minneapolis law firms and served as a fellow for the Center for Law in the Public Interest. She serves on the faculty of the National Association of Women Judges and is a member of the board of the Southern California American Civil Liberties Union. Professor Hempel also has served on the California State Bar's Standing Committee on Legal Services for Prisoners and as a clinical legal specialist for the American Bar Association's Central and East European Law Initiative programs in Kazakstan, Uzbekistan and Yugoslavia.

Professor Hempel teaches courses for the Post-Conviction Justice Project, Criminal Law, and a seminar on Gender, Crime and Justice. She holds a B.A. from USC and a J.D. from Yale University. She clerked for the Honorable Richard A. Gadbois of the United States District Court for the Central District of California. [Mark Godsey]

This week the CrimProf Blog spotlights Vanderbilt University School of Law CrimProf Allison Marston Danner.

Allison Danner is an authority on international criminal law. She has authored amicus briefs on the law of war in litigation over the rights of enemy combatants and has published articles in leading journals, including the Stanford Law Review, the Virginia Law Review, and the American Journal of International Law.

In 2004, she received the prestigious Déak Prize from the American Society of International Law for outstanding scholarship by a young author. She is a past member of the Board of Visitors of Stanford Law School and the Executive Council of the American Society of International Law.

Before joining the law faculty, Professor Danner was a clerk for United States Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens and for Court of Appeals Judge John T. Noonan, Jr. Her scholarship and expertise encompass a variety of international law topics, including public international law, international criminal law, international trade law and policy, as well as U.S. criminal law. She is affiliated with Vanderbilt's International Legal Studies Program. In 2006, she served as a Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School and at U.C.L.A. Law School. [Mark Godsey]

Professor Bucy received her B.A. degree in 1975 from Austin College and her J.D. in 1978 from Washington University School of Law, where she was elected to the Order of the Coif. Upon graduation from law school, Professor Bucy served as law clerk to the Honorable Theodore McMillian of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit.

From 1980 through May 1987, Professor Bucy was an assistant United States attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri. She served in the Criminal Division, specializing in prosecutions of white-collar criminal fraud. She established and served as coordinator of the Health Care Fraud Task Force for the Eastern District of Missouri. While with the U.S. Department of Justice, Professor Bucy served as an instructor of the appellate advocacy course in the U.S. Department of Justice Attorney GeneralÕs Advocacy Institute.

Many readers of this blog are familiar with Richard Leo’s research and publications on routine police interrogation practices ("Inside the Interrogation Room" (1996), The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology; "Police Interrogation as a Confidence Game" (1996), Law & Society Review), the impact of Miranda in the real world (“The Impact of Miranda Revisited" (1996), The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology; "Adapting to Miranda (1999), Minnesota Law Review; "Questioning the Relevance of Miranda in the Twenty-First Century" (2001), TheMichigan Law Review), the psychology of police interrogation and false confession ("The Decision to Confess Falsely” (1997), Denver University Law Review; “The Social Psychology of Police Interrogation” (1997), Studies in Law Politics and Society), the consequences of false confession and wrongful conviction ("The Consequences of False Confessions" (1998), The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology; The Problem of False Confessions in the Post-DNA World” (2004) North Carolina Law Review), and regulating interrogation practices and confession evidence (“Bringing Reliability Back In” (2006), Wisconsin Law Review; “The Ethics of Deceptive Interrogation” (1992) Criminal Justice Ethics).

In addition to his many articles and book chapters on these and related subjects, Leo has recently completed two books: Police Interrogation and American Justice will be published by Harvard University Press in the Fall of 2007; and Web of Lies: Murder and Injustice in Virginia (with Tom Wells) will be published by The New Press in 2008 (Leo has previously authored The Miranda Debate: Law, Justice and Policing (1998) with Rutgers CrimProf George Thomas.

After 9 years as a faculty member at U.C. Irvine (in the Departments of Criminology and Psychology) and 3 years as a faculty member at CU Boulder (in the Sociology department and Law School), Leo has joined the faculty at the University of San Francisco Law School, where he will teach criminal law, criminal procedure, white-collar crime, and wrongful convictions. Leo is widely sought after as a consultant and expert witness in criminal and civil cases involving disputed interrogations and confessions, and has worked on many of the most high profile interrogation and confessions cases of the last two decades (including the Central Park Jogger case, Michael Crowe, Earl Washington, and others). He has also worked with many Innocence Projects: for example, he helped the Innocence Project at Cardozo Law School win the freedom of Bruce Godschalk, the Innocence Project at the University of Wisconsin win the freedom of Beth LaBatte, and the Innocence Project at the University of Washington reverse the wrongful conviction of Ted Bradford. Leo regularly lectures to organizations of criminal defense attorneys, prosecutors, judges and/or forensic psychologists and psychiatrists in America and Canada.

Barry McCarthy is an expert in criminal law and procedure and in juvenile law, both in the United States and abroad. He is the former chair of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court's Criminal Procedural Rules Committee (1993-1999) and currently is the chair of the Pennsylvania Juvenile Court Rules Committee. He served as a consultant to the Law Reform Commission of Ireland for almost 20 years, and has also been a consultant to the U.S. Department of State.

He was an adviser to Ireland's director of public prosecutions, and an active member of the International Bar Association. Author of Pennsylvania Juvenile Delinquency Practice and Procedure (West/Thomson 1984-2005) and coauthor of Juvenile Law and Its Processes (Lexis 1979 – 2003),

Professor McCarthy is former chair of the Family and Juvenile Law Section of the Association of American Law Schools. His scholarly work has appeared in New York University Law Review, Temple Law Review, and University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform, among others. He previously taught law at Capital University and University College Dublin.

CromProf Quote: "While it is a cliche that over time everything changes, this saying has special meaning for a law school education. Students frequently come to law school uncertain of why, or whether they want to be lawyers. Law school is a time to consider these matters and to discover what is of interest in the law as well as in what direction one's talent lies. As a result, quite often students undergo a change of direction themselves from what they presupposed. Beyond this, however, law school is a time for preparing students for a changing world. It is a time of preparation not for the immediate practice of law, but rather for a lifetime career in the law."

Professor Bucy received her B.A. degree in 1975 from Austin College and her J.D. in 1978 from Washington University School of Law, where she was elected to the Order of the Coif. Upon graduation from law school, Professor Bucy served as law clerk to the Honorable Theodore McMillian of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit.

From 1980 through May 1987, Professor Bucy was an assistant United States attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri. She served in the Criminal Division, specializing in prosecutions of white-collar criminal fraud. She established and served as coordinator of the Health Care Fraud Task Force for the Eastern District of Missouri. While with the U.S. Department of Justice, Professor Bucy served as an instructor of the appellate advocacy course in the U.S. Department of Justice Attorney GeneralÕs Advocacy Institute.

Professor Charlow graduated with honors from both Vassar College and Cornell Law School and is a member of the Order of the Coif. She teaches, writes and lectures primarily in the areas of constitutional and criminal law, with scholarly articles appearing in the Stanford, Cornell, and Texas Law Reviews and numerous media appearances. She has been recognized by students for her teaching contributions.

Prior to coming to Hofstra, Professor Charlow was law clerk to Judge Richard J. Cardamone of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, appellate counsel in the Federal Defender Services Unit, a senior legislative analyst for the New York City Office of Management and Budget, and a full-time consultant to the National Advisory Committee of Federal Public and Community Defenders to fulfill that group's statutory responsibility to assist in the initial development of the Federal Sentencing Guidelines. Since joining the Hofstra faculty, she has served on various committees of the National Board of the American Civil Liberties Union and on the Executive Committee of the American Association of Law Schools Section on Criminal Law and Procedure.

Martha Grace Duncan brings a rich array of experiences and credentials to her work at Emory Law School. As an undergraduate, she lived for six months in Bogota, Colombia, where she interviewed and traveled with members of the Alianza Nacional Popular, which was then Colombia's major opposition party. In graduate school, on a fellowship from the Latin American Institute of Columbia University, she journeyed to remote regions of Brazil to interview leaders of sugar worker unions and peasant movements.

For her doctoral thesis in political science, Duncan conducted in-depth interviews with life-long American activists to explore the genesis and meaning of radicalism in their lives. On the strength of this work, she was admitted as a post-doctoral candidate to the NYU Psychoanalytic Institute at New York University Medical Center.

In 1980, she matriculated at Yale Law School, where she was elected an Article and Book Review Editor of the YALE LAW JOURNAL. Following graduation, she clerked for Judge Robert Bork on the United States Court of Appeals for the D. C. Circuit.

Professor Duncan has published articles and essays in a range of fields and genres, including political science, history, memoir, and law. Her latest law review article, "'So Young and So Untender': Remorseless Children and the Expectations of the Law," was published in the COLUMBIA LAW REVIEW, and her memoir "A Perfect Start" was selected as a "Notable Essay of 2004, in THE BEST AMERICAN ESSAYS OF 2005. Her book, ROMANTIC OUTLAWS, BELOVED PRISONS: THE UNCONSCIOUS MEANINGS OF CRIME AND PUNISHMENT (New York University Press) was reissued in paperback and received numerous favorable reviews.

Kate Bloch received her undergraduate education at Washington University in St. Louis as an Arnold J. Lien merit scholar. Before departing Washington University, she completed an M.A. in French.

During her student days in St. Louis, she was a member of Phi Beta Kappa and played on an intramural inner tube water polo team. Once in California, Professor Bloch attended Stanford Law School where she was a Senior Note Editor on the Stanford Law Review.

Following graduation and the California Bar, Professor Bloch clerked for the United States Court of Appeals, District of Columbia Circuit. Prior to joining the Hastings Faculty, she represented the People of the State of California as a Deputy District Attorney for the County of Santa Clara

Professor McConville joined the Chapman faculty as an Associate Professor in August 2000. Before coming to Chapman, she was a visiting faculty member at Case Western Reserve School of Law, where she received the Student Bar Association's Teacher of the Year award for 1999, an honor determined by the graduating class. She earned her B.A. at Boston University, graduating magna cum laude, and her J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center, graduating magna cum laude in the top one percent of her class. She was selected for Order of the Coif and served as an editor for the Georgetown Law Journal's Criminal Procedure Project.

After law school, Professor McConville served as a law clerk to Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist at the Supreme Court of the United States. She also clerked for Judge Cynthia Holcomb Hall on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and for Judge Donald C. Nugent on the United States District Court for the Northern District of Ohio.

Following her clerkship on the Supreme Court, Professor McConville practiced law for three years as an associate with Shea & Gardner in Washington, D.C., working primarily on litigation matters involving constitutional, labor, banking, and aviation law issues. Professor McConville's current research and writing projects are in the constitutional law and death penalty areas. [Mark Godsey]

Professor Barger brings experience in both private practice and governmental service to ASL. She received her B.S. degree magna cum laude from Wright State University, where she distinguished herself in national mock trial competitions, before receiving her J.D. degree from the Georgetown University Law Center.

At Georgetown, she served on the Moot Court Board, placed first in a national moot court competition, worked in the Criminal Justice Clinic, and taught research and writing as a Senior Writing Fellow.

After serving as a law clerk to the Circuit Court for the 31st Judicial Circuit in Manassas, Virginia, Professor Barger worked as an Assistant Public Defender in Fairfax County, defending individuals in more than sixty felony jury trials.

She also practiced at a law firm in Washington, D.C., where her practice focused on Native American law, litigation, government contracting, and labor and employment law. Professor Barger teaches Criminal Law, Criminal Process, Appellate Advocacy, and upper-level Criminal Law and Procedure electives. She also serves as faculty advisor to the Moot Court Board.

Professor Birdsong teaches Criminal Law, White Collar Crime, Evidence, Federal Jurisdiction, and Immigration Law. He received his Juris Doctor degree from the Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1973.

Immediately after law school, he was an attorney with the law firm of Baker & Hostetler. Later he served as a diplomat with the State Department with various postings in Nigeria, Germany, and the Bahamas. Professor Birdsong also worked as a federal prosecutor, first as an Assistant United States Attorney for the District of Columbia, and later as a Special Assistant United States Attorney for the U.S. Virgin Islands.

After leaving government service, Professor Birdsong was in private practice in Washington, D.C., where he specialized in trial work ranging from criminal defense work to political asylum matters. While in private practice, Professor Birdsong was also involved with broadcast work. He has done on-air TV legal analysis work for Fox News, CNN, Court TV, BET TV News, and for W*USA Channel 9 in Washington, D.C.

During this same period, he also produced and hosted several radio talk programs in the Washington, D.C., and Baltimore areas. Currently, Professor Birdsong is occasionally invited to appear as a legal commentator on Fox News and MSNBC. [Mark Godsey]

Eve L. Brensike joins the Michigan Law faculty as an assistant professor of law. She earned her B.A., magna cum laude, from Brown University, and, before entering law school, worked as a criminal investigator for the Public Defender Service in Washington, D.C., as well as a property subrogation paralegal for the Law Offices of White and Williams in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

She earned her J.D., summa cum laude, from the University of Michigan Law School, where she was an articles editor on the Michigan Law Review as well as a board member on the Henry M. Campbell Moot Court Board. During law school, she volunteered at a number of public defender and capital defense organizations in addition to working in the Civil Rights Division of the United States Department of Justice.

After law school, Brensike clerked for the Honorable Stephen Reinhardt on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and worked in both the trial and appellate divisions of the Maryland Office of the Public Defender. Brensike’s research and teaching interests include criminal law, criminal procedure, evidence, and habeas corpus. [Mark Godsey]

Professor Sandra Guerra Thompson is a graduate of Yale University, where she earned a B.A. in Economics in 1985 and a J.D. from the Yale Law School in 1988. She served as an Assistant District Attorney in the New York County (Manhattan) District Attorney's Office where she practiced both trial and appellate criminal law from 1988-1990.

She joined the faculty of the University of Houston Law Center in 1990. She teaches Criminal Law, Federal Criminal Law, Evidence, Criminal Procedure, Sentencing, and Prisoners' Rights and Prison Reform. She was also Director of the Mexican Legal Studies Program in 2000, and taught a course for that program called "Criminal Law Issues in U.S.-Mexico Relations."

Professor Thompson has authored numerous articles on criminal law issues, focusing especially on drug sentencing, asset forfeiture and federal law enforcement. She has co-authored a treatise entitled, "The Law of Asset Forfeiture." Professor Thompson's service activities have included serving as the co-principal investigator for the University of Houston Law Center Keck Professionalism Initiative. She is an elected member of the American Law Institute and was appointed to the Board of Advisors for the American Law Institute's project entitled "Model Penal Code: Sentencing."

She has served on the planning committee for the Houston Bar Association's Criminal Bench-Bar Conference. She is a long-standing member of the Board of Directors of the Hispanic Bar Association. She is a former Chair of the Criminal Justice Section of the Association of American Law Schools.

Tracey Meares received her B.S. in General Engineering from the University of Illinois, and her J.D. from The Law School. She joined the University of Chicago faculty in 1994 after serving as an Honors Program Trial Attorney in the Antitrust Division of the United States Department of Justice. Prior to serving as a Department of Justice prosecutor Ms. Meares clerked for Judge Harlington Wood, Jr. of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.

Ms Meares's teaching and research interests center on criminal procedure and criminal law policy, with a particular emphasis on empirical investigation of these subjects. In addition to teaching at The Law School, Ms Meares has an appointment as a Senior Research Fellow at the American Bar Foundation. She is also a faculty member of the University of Chicago Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture. [Mark Godsey]

A well-respected authority on comparative law, Stanislaw Frankowski has authored and co-authored numerous articles and books — in English and in Polish — on subjects ranging from abortion and protection of the human fetus, to pre-trial detention, to the death penalty in postcommunist Europe. His book, Legal Responses to AIDS in Comparative Perspective, with 10 chapters written by legal scholars from five continents, is considered by many to be the most comprehensive review of legal responses to HIV/AIDS to date.

Professor Frankowski spent 2002 and 2003 on sabbatical completing the book, Introduction to Polish Law, and translating the Polish penal code into English.

Frankowski taught law at the University of Warsaw for nearly 20 years before martial law was imposed in 1981. He came to the United States and taught at the University of Santa Clara School of Law. He joined Saint Louis University School of Law in 1983. In 1992, he co-founded the School’s Center for International and Comparative Law. Through his efforts, the School’s law library shelves a premier collection of Polish legal publications that facilitate both the tracking of legal changes in Poland and current legal information for those interested in doing business in his homeland.

“Law doesn’t function in isolation,” Professor Frankowski says. “It’s grounded in politics and societies. It’s part of the larger picture, which comes out clearly when one adopts a comparative approach. Such an approach provides the most varied and enriching grasp of the spirit of the of the law.”

Professor Frankowski has been a fellow at the Max-Planck-Institute of Foreign and International Criminal Law in Germany and at the Criminal Law Education and Research Center at New York University School of Law. He has been a guest lecturer in many countries, including Germany, Poland, Holland and Mexico. [Mark Godsey]

Professor Gassama has been heavily involved in issues surrounding human rights, foreign policy, and international economic development. These issues led him to recruit and train observers of elections in Haiti and South Africa, including South Africa's first all-race democratic election. In some cases, he served as an observer himself. Afterward, he supervised reports from the governmental agencies involved in the elections. Gassama has also worked as a staff attorney for the Legal Action Center in New York, representing clients on employment discrimination issues.

From 1985 to 1990, Gassama worked on human rights, foreign policy, and international economic development issues for TransAfrica, the African American lobby for Africa and the Caribbean. In 1994 Gassama coordinated the recruitment, training, and deployment of U.S. based nongovernmental observers participating in South Africa's first all-race democratic election. Gassama supervised the preparation of reports on the work of the South African Independent Electoral Commission and participated in two election-observer delegations composed of American and African lawyers.

Gassama's academic interest focuses on problems of international order; the changing role of international institutions in the post Cold War era; and the interrelationships among human rights, environmental degradation, and economic development.